John Muir (Travels) of his first
impressions of the mountains of western North Carolina

With issues
such as development, zoning and land-use legislation, toxic waste and air
pollution almost constantly in the news these days here in western North
Carolina, Ive been thinking about this business of the desecration of the
environment, and who it might be that is going to lead us out of this
self-destructive paradigm that was set into motion with the Industrial
Revolution and has continued to gather momentum in the lastcentury and a half with the rise of
free-market capitalism. Where are the "dirt-doctors," the
"earth-healers"?I keep
asking myself.Where are the great
charismatic voices in government that might begin the work of turning things
around? And if not in government, then in the culture in general--where are our
leaders? It seems that when looking in all the obvious places, there is no one
addressing the really pressing questions of our day: overpopulation,
development, preservation, free-trade capitalism.

It seems to
me that it has always been the naturalists who have led the way toward a more
progressive thinking whereas questions of balance and sustainability are
concerned. That it is the nature writers who have positioned themselves on the
front lines of the myriad battles to save and preserve the environment. And
through their writing, have sown the seeds that would sprout as ecological
movements, private foundations and governmental programs focused on the long
view whereas the welfare of the countrys and the planets landscape is
concerned. Past generations have looked to the work of Emerson, Thoreau,
Burroughs, Muir, Bartram, Kephart, Leopold, Carson, Eisley....and then, even
more recently, to writers like Robinson Jeffers, Gary Snyder, and, finally, to the
South in writers like Wendell Berry of the Kentucky Appalachian backcountry and
farm communities (who has written exquisitely on local culture and community
for the better part of a lifetime in such books as The Unsettling of America
and The Gift of Good Land), and Thomas Berry ( a North Carolina native, who, in
his books The Dream of the Earth and The Great Work, has captured the
imagination ofthe whole
environmental movement with his elevated message of spiritual ecology).
Following in their footsteps,is a
new generation and a new breed of gifted Southern nature writers.

"If
you would learn the secrets of nature,:" Thoreau wrote, "you must
practice more humanity than others." That credo, more or less, sums up the
ethos ofthese "new
naturalists." They are not only talking the talk, they are walking the
walk. They are not only writing an engaged prose and poetry that evokes the
spirit of "The Old Naturalists" and their tenants for a sustainable
future, but are quite literally engaged in a kind of activism that is, at once,
journalistic and/or literary and biographical. They are, through their work and
deeds, inspiring, organizing and participating in non-violent
"actions" and activities that provide alternatives to community
apathy and destruction of natural habitat.

While most
of the writers of name have and continue to come from the northeast, mid-west,
or west coast, the South has "risen up" to give the other sections of
the country a run for its money. Here in the mountains ofthe Southern Appalachians--in and
around the area of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park --alone, is an
exceptional group of dedicated, if not devout, 60s generation nature writers
worthy of national attention. In a region where the issues of air pollution,
water quality, extinction of floral and faunal species, and loss of traditional
cultures are front and center, this handful of remarkable writers are not only
making a mark on the genre of environmental non-fiction, but are making a
difference.

This group
of"Southern Nature"
writers is anchored in Athens,Georgia by the Southern Nature Writers Gatherings and the University of
Georgia Press. Seniored by such voices as those of Jim Kilgo andFranklin Burroughs,are a younger cadre of eco-activist
writers and poets who have joined ranks with their elder kinsmen to form a
Southern Nature Writerscontingent
that has served notice and is setting the Southeast, if not the rest of the
nation on fire. Writers such as Chrisopher Camuto, Bill Belleville, Janisse
Ray, John Lane, Roger Pinckney, Susan Cerulean, Jan DeBlieu, Dorinda Dahlmeyer,
Ann Fisher-Wirth and Julie Hauserman being essential to this southern brigade.

Recently, a
few of this elite group have gotten well-deserved recognition from their
leadership as well as their work and are singled out, here, as if standards to
hold up to the rest of the country and its various writers and regions.If there is anyone who has embraced and
embodied the writing of Thoreau and Kephart it is the recluse of the group, George
Ellison. As someone who has lived for some time without electricity and running
water over in his Swain County, North Carolina home--in a cabin only
approachable by foot--his knowledge of nature lore and Native American history
in this region is approaching the level of being encyclopedic. His newspaper
columns, his frequent nature-walk workshops, and his contributions to the
living folklore of the region have been and continue to be invaluable in
educating the public about its past as well as its invasive present. His stamp
appears on two of the seminal tomes of Southern Appalachian cultural
history:Mooneys The Myths of the
Cherokee, and Kepharts Our Southern Highlanders, for which he has been bestowed
with the honor of being asked to write new, updated Introductions.

Just next
door,in Jackson County,
whitewater enthusiast, wilderness and recreation writer and poet John Lane has
taken up summer residency in a remote cove off Johns Creek Road in the Caney
Fork section of Cullowhee in a beautiful traditionally-reconstructed one-room
saw-mill shack built by fifth-generation Macon County native Keith Monteith,
and is actively involved in water and land development issues in the region,
while writing a book on the Chattahoochee River. His journal-entry book Weed
Time, which was written in the environs of Whittier while living up Camp Creek
Road at the old Jim Smith nursery, is a snap-shot, or better yet, a petroglyph
ofplace-based awareness. His investigative
journalism work in behalf of ecological issues here in the mountains and down
on the other side of the "Blue Wall" in the South Carolina piedmont
in Spartanburg County are written, thoughtfully, in attack mode, leaving no
stone unturned. While his journalistic work is clever, aggressive and geologic,
his poetry written here in and about these mountains is equally, in the other
direction, gentle, sensitive, fluid.

Waking in
the Blue Ridge

In the
animal light of early morning

dreams
persist but I am quickly

victim to
the worlds precision --

how oaks
become one

in a web of
blue above,

and the fox
bursts

toward the
nested quail,

or in
tricks of color

copperheads
coil

where they
could not be.

All this in
the hour

before
breakfast, in the heaven

of
unnoticed verdancy and light.

And then
there is Christopher Camuto, whose writing on fly-fishing, redwolves and the Great Smoky Mountain
National Park is the stuff of supernovas. His rise to prominence as a Southern
Appalachian nature writer: meteoric. His whip-cracking intellect and inspired
vocabulary have been a wake-up call for other writers and for readers of
regional and natural history. His combined mix of an autobiographical and
objective writing style is the next best thing to "being there."The visual images he creates with
language go way beyond being merely "photographic." They linger and
last in the minds eye--for months and years on end. His book Another Country:
Journeying Toward the Cherokee Mountains(just re-released by the University of Georgia Press) is, in my opinion,
one of the best books ever written about western North Carolina.

I
think of the virtues of the animals that became the

founding
spirits for the Cherokee clans. I think of the autumn dance of

white-tails
in the rut and the delicate way bears walk. I think of the

stillness
of trout, of the silver of moving water. I thing of the masks that

animals
wear that became the masks of those dancers, of the way men learned

to
drum on hollow logs like grouse, to pipe like wood thrush, to weave like

spiders,
to fashion baskets light as spruce cones, to scream in battle like

ravens,
to hunt like wolves.

Janisse
Ray, a native Georgia "cracker," who is struggling to save the
southern Long Leaf Pine, as well as her family farm,from extinction, is theauthor of the award-winning book The Ecology of a Cracker
Childhood. Janisse is the youngest of our regional cadre of new naturalist
writer/activists, but may be the rising star of the group. Her charisma, her
immutable will, her strong sense of the feminine, her gameliness and grit
coupled with a very disciplined and poetic relationship with language, makes
her the kind of show-stopper the environmental movement needs in order to bring
attention to important issues. Not only has she turned many heads in a nature-writing
literary world dominated by men, with her striking good looks, but has turned
heads with her dexterity and integrity in such poems as the following from her
collection titled Naming the Unseen which pays tribute to the place of her
origins:

Bone
Deposit

When I am
dead, put my bones in Georgia

that made
them. Give back the calcium,

phosphorous,
the holy manganese that serve

me well --
keepers of this unruly flesh.

When I am
dead, let me honor land that

struck fire
within and offered to hot and

hungry air
a skeleton pieced of earth

that holds
me aloft in the spinningand

spiraling
of this world. The elements of

bones
compel me. I return time and

again to
feel her soil, wondering what I

search for,
what hauls me back: ossein of

day-myths,
compound of marrow percolating

subterranean
veins, debt that will be freed.

In addition
to these high-profile, rising stars of the "Southern Nature"
cadre,there is an ever-expanding
core group of cultural and environmental activists here in the mountains
working alongside one another to create some sort of bioregional awareness as
well as a sense ofresponsibility
for our regional ecosystem. During the 1980s and early 1990s, the
beast-of-burden of this movement was a publication called Katuah Journal and
its loyal, hard-working heart of pro bono editors and writers. Espousing the
values, ethics and hands-on particulars of the Bioregional and Green movements,
Katuahs main emphasis was on teaching and its mainvehicle was the
newspaper--which, until its demise in the early 1990s, had a focused mixture of
articles on plant lore, environmental issues, gardening and farming tips,
regional geographic history, Native American culture.

More
recently, however, the movement for a sustained environment has been enjoined
by anthropologist/writer/activist Harvard Ayers at Appalachian State--whose
work in books such as An Appalachian Tragedy: Air Pollution and Tree Death in
The Eastern Forests of North America (Sierra Club) and Polluted Parks in Peril:
The Five Most Air-Polluted Parks in the United States as well as his work in
behalf of clean air coalitions here in western North Carolina has been
influential, if not essential to the recent passage of the ground-breaking
"Clean Smokestacks Act" which passed the North Carolina joint
Assemblies in June of this year, setting a precedent for the

rest of the
country.

What do all
these writers have in common? They have all, at some time, if not often,
appeared in the pages of a visionary news weekly that is the brainchild of
founder andpublisher/editor Scott
McLeod, called The Smoky Mountain News. The team of staff writer Don Hendershot
and publisher ScottMcLeod have
made The Smoky Mountain News a much-needed addition and mainstay to the more
conservatively traditional and "old school" papers that fall short in
claiming to be the environmental voice of the people in the western mountains.
The Smoky Mountain News, with its diligence and thoughtful writing, week in and
week out, on the subject of the environment, has served to not only educate but
to focus attention on the many issues here in the region whereas the health and
balance of things natural are concerned.

While the
amount of work to be done in cleaning up our environment here in the southern
Blue Ridge Mountains might, at times, seem overwhelming, these "new
naturalists" and others like them are, Im convinced, equal to the task.
This is a focused and dedicated bunch who have taken on the heavy yoke of
unchecked "progress," "growth" and "development,"
and with strongshoulders are
pulling the ecology wagon in which the rest ofthe nation rides. "May it continue"....as the old
Cherokee ceremonial chant goes: this nature-activist tradition, this beautiful
place, and these people who live here well.